The clarion. [volume] (Jackson, Miss.) 1883-1888, 1887-05-04

-annot afford to read bad book, how
ever good you are You say: ''The influence
IS Insignificant" l tell you that the scratch
Of pin has sometimes produced the lock jaw.
Alas, If through curiosity, as many do, you
pry into an evil book, your curiosity is as
dangerous as that of the man who would take
a torch into gunpowder mill merely to see
whether it would really blow up or not In
a menagerie in New York a man put his arm
through the bars of a black leopard's cage.
The animals hide looked so sleek, and bright,
and beautiful He just stroked it once. The
seized him, and he drew forth hand
torn, and mangled, and bleeding Oh, touch
not evil, even with the faintest strokei
Though it may be glossy and beautiful, touch
it not, lest you pull forth your soul torn and
bleeding under the clutch of the black
leopard But" you say, ''how can find
out whether book is good or bad without
reading it7n There is always something sus-
picious about bad book. l never knew an
xception-something suspicious in the index
or style of illustration This venomous rep
tile almost always carries a warning rattle.
Again: l charge you to stand off from all
those books which corrupt the imagination
and inflame the passions. do not refer now
TO that kind of book which the villain has
under his coat waiting for the school to get
out and then, looking both ways TO see that
there is no policeman around the block,
offers the book 20 your son ON his way home
l do not speak of that kind Of literature, but
that which evades the law and comes out in
polished style, and with acute plot sounds the
tocsin that rouses up all the baser passions of
the soul To-day, under the nostrils of this
land, there is fetid, reeking, uhwashed itera-
ture enough to poison all the fountains of
public virtue and smite your sons and daugh-
tiers as with the wing of a destroying angel,
and it is time that the minister's of the Gospel
blew the trumpet and rallied the forces of
righteousness, all armed TO the teeth, in this
great battle against depraved literature.
Again, abstain from those books which are
apologetic of crime. 1t is a sad thing that
some of the best and most beautiful book
bindery, and some of the finest rhetoric, have
been brought TO make sin attractive. Vice is
horrible thing, anyhow. 1t is born in
shame and it dies bowling in the darkness.
In this world it IS scourged with a whip of
scorpions, but afterward the thunders of
Gods wrath pursue it across boundless
desert beating it with ruin and woe. When
YOU come TO paint carnality, do not paint it
as looking from behind embroidered curtains
or through lattice of royal seraglio, but as
writhing in the agonies of city hospital
Cursed be the books that try to make i'm
purity decent and crime attractive and
hypocrisy noble. Cursed be the books that
swarm with libertines and desperadoes, who
make the brain Of the young people whirl
with villainy. Ye authors who write them,
We publishers who print them, ye booksellers
who distribute them shall be cut to pieces, if
not by an aroused community, then at last by
the hail of Divine vengeance, which shall
sweep to the lowest pit of perdition all
We murderers of souls. / tell you, though
you may escape in this world, you will
be ground at last under the hoof of eternal
calamities, and you will be chained to the
rock, and you will have the vultures of des-
pair clawing at your soul, and those whom
you have destroyed will come around to tor
ment you, and to pour hotter Goals of fury
upon your head, and rejoice eternally in the
cutlery of your pain and the howl of your
damnation. God shall wound the hairy
scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses. -
The clock strikes midnight A fair form
bends over a romance. The eyes flash fire.
The breath is quick and irregular. Occa-
sionally the color flashes to the cheek and
then dies out The hands tremble as though
a guardian spirit were trying to shake the
deadly book out of the grasp. Hot tears fall.
She laughs with shrill voice that drops dead
at its own sound. The sweat on her brow is
the spray dashed up from the river of death.
The clock strikes -four" and the rosy dawn
soon after begins to look through the lattice
upon the pale form that looks like detained
specter of the night. Soon in a mad house she
will mistake her ringlets for curling serpents,
and thrust her white hand through the bars of
the prison, and smite her head, rubbing it
back though to push the scalp from the
skull, shrieking: my brainl my braini" Oh,
stand off from that! Why will you go sound
ing your way amid the reefs and warning
buoys when there is such vast ocean in
which you may voyage, all sail set?
There is one other thing l shall say this
morning before / leave you, whether you
want to hear it or not. That is, that 1 con-
slider the lascivious pictorial literature of the
day as most tremendous for ruin. There is
no one who can like good pictures better than
/ do. The quickest and most condensed way
of impressing the public mind is by picture.
What the painter does by his brush for few
favorites the engraver does by his knife
for the million. What the author accom-
plishes by fifty pages the artist does by a
flash. The best part of painting that costs
$4,000 you may buy for ten cents. Fine
paintings belong to the aristocracy of art.
Engravings belong to the democracy of art.
You do well to gather good pictures in your
homes. Spread them before your children
after the tea hour is past and the evening
circle is gathered. Throw them on the in
valids couch. Strew them through the rail
train to cheer the traveller on his journey.
Tack them on the wall of the nursery.
Gather them in albums and portfolios. God
speed the good pictures on their way with
ministries of knowledge and mercy
But what shall 1 say of the prostitution of
this art to purposes of iniquity. These death
warrants of the soul are at every street
corner. They smite the vision of the young
man with pollution. Many a young man
buying copy has bought his eternal dis
comfture. There may be enough poison in
one bad picture to poison one soul, and that
soul may poison ten, and ten fifty, and the
fifty hundreds, and the hundreds thousands,
until nothing but the measuring line of
eternity can tell the height, and depth, and
ghastliness, and horror of the great undoing.
The work of death that the wicked author
does in whole book the bad engraver may
do on a half side of pictorial Under the
guise of pure mirth, the young man buys one
of these sheets. He unrolls it before his COM
rades amid roars of laughter, but long after
the paper is gone the result may perhaps be
seen in the blasted imaginations of those who
saw it. The queen of death holds banquet
every night, and these periodicals are the
printed invitation to her guests. Alas that
the fair brow of American art should be
blotched with this plague spot, and that
philanthropists, bothering themselves about
smaller evils. should lift up no united and
vehement voice against this great calamity
Young man, buy not this moral strychnine
for your souli Pick not up this nest of
cooled adders for your pocket! Patronize no
news stand that keeps theml Have your
room bright with good engravings; but for
these outrageous pictorials have not one wall,
not one bureau, not one pocket Aman is no
better than the picture he loves to look at
If your eyes are not pure your heart cannot
be. At news stand one can guess the char
acter Of a man by the kind of pictorial he
purchases. When the devil fails to get a
man to read a bad book he sometimes sue
ceeds in getting him to look at bad picture.
When satan goes a fishing he does not care
whether it is long line or short line, If he
only draws his victim in. Beware of lascivi-
GUS pictorials, young MANN the name Of Al
mighty God 1 charge you.
Ii l have this morning successfully laid
down any principles by which you may judge
in regard to books and newspapers, then 1
have done something of which shall not be
ashamed on the day which shall try every
mans work of what sort it is.
Cherish good books and newspapers. Be
ware Of the bad ones. One column
may save your soul; one paragraph may
ruin it Benjamin Franklin said that the
reading OF Cotton Mather's Essay on Doing
Good nodded his entire life. The assassin OF
Lord Russell declared that he was led into
crime by reading one vivid romance. The
consecrated John Angel James, than whom
England never produced better man, de-
clared in his old days that he had never yet
got over the evil effects Of having for fifteen
minutes once read bad book. But / need
not go so far on + could come near home
and tell you of something that occurred in
my college days could tell you Of CON-
rade who was great hearted, noble and gem
erous He was studying for an honorable
profession. but he had an infIdel book in his